AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU is pitched as a competitor for the impossible-to-find Nvidia RTX 3070, with prices of $479 and $499, respectively. Unfortunately, leaked benchmarks suggest that AMD’s new card may struggle against the $399 Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti.
The leaker @TUM_APISAK shared a couple of Geekbench 5 tests for the RX 6700 XT when paired with an AMD Ryzen 3700X CPU and 32GB of RAM, and the results proved to be disappointing.
- Where to buy Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti
- Nvidia RTX 3080 vs. RTX 2080 Ti: How much better is it?
- PLUS: I won the PS5 restock fight — here's how I beat the bots
The Vulkan test saw the RX 6700 XT achieving a total of 55,278 on Geekbench 5 which, to put things into context, is around 42% lower than the 95,856 average managed by the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti in the same benchmark. On that page even the entry-level RTX 3060 beats it, with an average score of 79,528.
RX 6700 XThttps://t.co/bcMmTMwkRchttps://t.co/UhvTtj9Z2R pic.twitter.com/26U41Y4hA9March 10, 2021
Not all benchmarks are created equal, of course, and in Geekbench 5’s OpenCL test, the RX 6700 XT performs far better, managing a score of 102,831. That’s definitely an improvement, but it’s still some way behind the 120,576 average managed by the 3060 Ti using the same test.
Don’t count AMD out yet
So what’s going on here? Well, there are a couple of things to remember before you rule out AMD. Firstly, the RX 6700 XT’s scores are based on just two benchmarks, while the figures for the 3060 Ti are the averages taken from every single test on the site. That reduces the impact of external factors like weak ancillary hardware and poor driver optimization.
And that brings us to the second point: the RX 3060 XT won’t be released for another week, so the drivers used for these benchmarks may not be ready for prime time. In short, it would be enormously surprising if the RX 3060 XT’s benchmarking performance didn’t improve massively once it’s out with retail drivers allowing it to live up to its full potential.
The million-dollar question is just how big that ‘full potential’ is. Is the RX 3060 XT a genuine competitor for the RTX 3070, or does it simply make the RTX 3060 Ti look like an absolute bargain?
We’ll have to wait until March 18th to find out, but depressingly for gamers it may be a moot point for the foreseeable future. Nvidia’s RTX 30 series cards have been in hugely short supply since release, in part thanks to crypto mining. All the signs point to the newest member of the AMD Radeon family proving just as illusive when it launches next week.
- More: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 vs 3080 vs 3070 vs 3060: What should you get?
